If slide leaked on Orb-Hardware is to be believed we GPU consumers are in for a pretty big treat in the next month or so. The slide shown below states that the AMD 7970 will have a default core clock speed of 925MHz and a whopping 3 GB of GDDR5 memory.

It also sports a 3.5 TFLOPs precision floating point. Which would put it well beyond the NVIDIA flagship single GPU solution. The slide states the a ROP count of 32, against an earlier speculated count of 48. This could be because AMD may have delinked ROP clusters from memory bus. The cooler itself is under the trademark AMD black shroud so there is no way to see if it uses the rumored "vapor chamber" as seen in after market solutions.

Looking past all the beastly prowess of this slide one cannot help but think about power draw. The "leaked" slide states the 7970 will have a peak power draw of 300 W and an idle draw of 3 W. We will have to wait for review to see if any of these amazing stats are true.

Remember how Cayman was a "Dual Graphics Engine" GPU? It was essentially two Barts GPUs glued together, each with dual 64-bit dual channel memory controllers, where the 2 GB of RAM came from.

This new GPU looks more like a "Tri Graphics Engine" GPU (they gave it a fancy marketing name, GCN = "Graphics Core Next"), so essentially three Barts GPUs glued together (albeit at 28nm), each with dual 64-bit dual channel memory controllers, and this is why it has exactly 3GB of RAM.

Conclusion?

Anyone with a tri-fire HD6870 setup can tell us exactly how this HD7970 card will perform.

I never said it is the same, for all we know there is a company that can make things worst than their previous generation.
Even if they some how manage to to make the ROPs twice as powerful, top-end Kepler has exactly 64ROPs and that is counting on nVidia some how doesn't know how to make their GPUs better.

I never said it is the same, for all we know there is a company that can make things worst than their previous generation.
Even if they some how manage to to make the ROPs twice as powerful, top-end Kepler has exactly 64ROPs and that is counting on nVidia some how doesn't know how to make their GPUs better.

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That is true

But we still don't have anything about Kepler (at least not as much we know about HD7xxx) so we can only guess how Kepler will perform(and we could also say the same for HD7xxx).
Guessing the performance based on paper numbers can backfire (a.k.a. Bulldozer )

it's the last step in a graphics pipeline, where all data is put together to be copied into the framebuffer, which then gets displayed on the monitor...anti aliasing and depth information is also processed there... (overly simplified)

so increasing the number of those units would only benefit, when 1) the units have not been improved over the last generation and to get more performance you need to have more ROPs, or 2) they have not been fast enough already...

Performance is not going to be HUGE since its a totally new approach, which usually means no 2x performance jump (again totally speculation take with a lethal dose of salt.). Some games I am sure the 6970 will be close to the speed, and in others it will get blown away.

Also, dont forget about AMD's infamously fast driver support. They probably only optimized 3Dmark and Unigine for now, and Crysis 2 and other games are still rendering with the "VGA adapter driver" from windows 95.

Performance is not going to be HUGE since its a totally new approach, which usually means no 2x performance jump. Some games I am sure the 6970 will be close to the speed, and in others it will get blown away.

Also, dont forget about AMD's infamously fast driver support. They probably only optimized 3Dmark and Unigine for now, and Crysis 2 and other games are still rendering with the "VGA adapter driver" from windows 95.

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The last time they changed architecture it was from the 48xx series to the 58xx series. If that wasnt a huge jump in performance I dunno what is. The 69xx series is just a refined 58xx series so don't base your opinions off of that.

The last time they changed architecture it was from the 48xx series to the 58xx series. If that wasnt a huge jump in performance I dunno what is. The 69xx series is just a refined 58xx series.

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I agree that was huge - but that wasnt a new Architecture IMO- it was the same VLIW concept tweaked. and in these cases performance increase is massive and proportional.

4870 had 800 stream procs... 5770 also had 800 tweaked with DX11 instead of DX10.1, and performance was similar.
5870 had 1600 stream procs - was double the speed of the 4870 give or take.

2900 - 3800 -4800 - 5800 - 6900 are all general variants of the same concept, 7xxx series seems a bit more radical, uses a totally new approach - closer to the 1950XTX to 2900XT shift (again, take with a lethal dose of salt purely my 2c)

Games this GPU needs to be benchmarked against at 1920x1200 & 2560x1600 before people can justifiably start to whine about the 32 ROPs:

Batman: Arkham City under DX11

Battlefield 3 on Ultra Preset, no custom bullshit

Metro: 2033 because its the new Crysis

Metro: Last Light upon release

Skyrim because people will froth if it isn't benchmarked... and then they'll froth anyway.

Witcher 2 with and without Ubersampling

And by the way, unless all the major sites have had 7970s since the beginning of December, I doubt we're going to see "reviews" including benchmarks next Thursday. Which is fine because I wouldn't want to see a 7970 benchmarked on pre-12.1 drivers anyway.

Wouldn't mind seeing these benchmarks on 120Hz monitors as well, now that I think about it. This vSync idiocy needs to end.

I agree that was huge - but that wasnt a new Architecture IMO- it was the same VLIW concept tweaked. and in these cases performance increase is massive and proportional.

4870 had 800 stream procs... 5770 also had 800 tweaked with DX11 instead of DX10.1, and performance was similar.
5870 had 1600 stream procs - was double the speed of the 4870 give or take.

2900 - 3800 -4800 - 5800 - 6900 are all general variants of the same concept, 7xxx series seems a bit more radical, uses a totally new approach - closer to the 1950XTX to 2900XT shift (again, take with a lethal dose of salt purely my 2c)

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The 7970 is rumored to have 128 texture units, and 2,048 stream processors.